Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer, an unsettling chess-player, died on January 17th, aged 64

PEOPLE were always coming to get Bobby Fischer. And he was ready for them. In a locked suitcase he kept bottles and bottles of vitamin pills and herbal potions and a large orange-juicer, in case they tried to put toxins in his food. His most precious memorabilia—match notebooks, photo albums, letters from President Nixon—were kept in a filing cabinet in a safe behind two combination locks in a ten-by-ten storage room in Pasadena, California. In the end, as he railed to radio talk-show hosts in Hungary and the Philippines, even all this couldn't keep him safe from Russians, or Jews, or “CIA rats who work for the Jews”. But he had tried.

They tried to disrupt his chess games, too. As he wrestled for the world championship against Boris Spassky at Reykjavik in 1972 they poked whirring TV cameras over his shoulder. They made the board too shiny, reflecting the lights, and fidgeted and coughed until he cleared out the first seven rows of the audience. By the third game he insisted on retreating to a tiny back room, where he could think. He was always better in dingy, womb-like spaces: the cabinet room of the Marshall Chess Club in New York City, where as a boy he skipped school to spend his mornings reading through old file-cards of 19th-century games; a particular table in the New York Public Library, where he sat for hours immersed in chess history, openings and strategy; or the walk-up family flat in Brooklyn where, once his mother and sister had moved out, he set up continuous chess games beside each bed, ignoring the outside sunshine to compete against himself. If you could see inside his brain, as his enemies no doubt hoped to, you would find it primed to attack and defend in every way possible, with a straight-moving rook or a sidling bishop, or with both in his favourite Ruy Lopez opening, or with the queen swallowing an early pawn in the “poisoned” version of the Sicilian, or a thousand others. At Reykjavik, when Mr Spassky was advised between games by 35 Russian grand masters, Mr Fischer had a notebook and his own long, lugubrious, clever head. And he won.

That made him a cold-war hero. The quirky individual had outplayed the state machine, and America had thrashed the Soviet Union at its own favourite game. But Mr Fischer, for all his elegant suits and childhood genius, his grandmastership at 15 and his 20-game winning streak at championship level in 1968-71, was always an unsettling poster-boy. His objective, he told everyone, was not just to win. It was to crush the other man's mind until he squirmed. And, in proper capitalist style, to get rich. At his insistence, the championship money was raised from $1,400 to $250,000; from the rematch with Mr Spassky in 1992, which he also won, he took away $3.5m. Since few venues, even Qatar or Caesar's Palace, offered him enough to make public playing worth his while, he spent the years after 1975 (when he forfeited his world title by refusing to defend it) largely wandering the world like a tramp, castigating his enemies. Only cold, eccentric Iceland welcomed him.

A house like a rook

What exactly was wrong with Bobby Fischer was a subject of much debate. The combination of high intelligence and social dysfunction suggested autism; but he had been a normal boy in many respects, enjoying Superman comics and going to hockey games. He had got mixed up in the 1960s with the Worldwide Church of God, a crazed millenarian outfit, and perhaps had learned from them to hate and revile the Jews; though he was Jewish himself, with a Jewish mother who had tried psychologists and the columns of the local paper to cure him of too much chess, but who still couldn't stop the pocket set coming out at the dinner table.

Possibly—some said—he had been unhinged by the American government's stern pursuit of him after the 1992 rematch, which was played illegally in the former Yugoslavia. He cursed “stinking” America to his death, and welcomed the 2001 terrorist attacks as “wonderful news”—at which much of the good he had done for chess in his country, from inspiring clubs to instructing players to simply making the game, for the first time, cool, drained away like water into sand.

Perhaps, in the end, the trouble was this: that chess, as he once said, was life, and there was nothing more. Mr Fischer was not good at anything else, had not persevered in school, had never done another job, had never married, but had pinned every urgent minute of his existence to 32 pieces and 64 black and white squares. He dreamed of a house in Beverly Hills that would be built in the shape of a rook.

Within this landscape, to be sure, he was one of the world's most creative players; no one was more scathing about the dullness of chess games that were simply feats of memorising tactics. Most world-championship games, he claimed, were pre-arranged, proof that the “old chess” was dead, and rotten to the core. He invented a new version, Fischer Random, in which the back pieces were lined up any old how, throwing all that careful book-learning to the winds. Yet the grid remained and the rules remained: attack, defend, capture, sacrifice. Win at all costs. From this grid, and from this war, Mr Fischer could never escape.